“My father’s study was a most uncomfortable place, and I never set foot inside it unless I was absolutely compelled to. The smell of books which pervaded it took my breath away, and that my father should always be at the table studying and writing seemed to me something terribly unnatural. I could not understand how he endured it, and I vowed that I would never become a student and writer like him...

“Once a year, however, I was obliged to see the inside of the study; that was between Christmas and New Year’s Day. A day came on which after breakfast father made the announcement: ‘To-day we’ll get the letters written. You accept the Christmas presents, but when it comes to writing letters of thanks for them, you are too lazy. Set to work, then, and don’t let me see any sulky faces!’

“Oh, those hours when I sat with my sisters in the study, breathing the book-laden air, listening to my father’s pen scratching the paper, but away in spirit with my schoolboy friends, who were whizzing down the road behind the church on their sledges, while I had to indite letters to uncles, aunts, godparents, and other givers of Christmas presents! And what letters! Never in all my life since then have I had to face such a task for my pen!

All the letters had, of course, the same content, and fell naturally into three sections: (1) thanks for the present received from that particular addressee, with the assurance that I liked it more than all the rest; (2) a list of all the presents received; (3) good wishes for the New Year. Yet with just this same content each letter had to be different from the others, while in every one of them the appalling difficulty reared its head of finding a neat transition from the list of presents to the good wishes. Of the need to bring in at the end of each the complimentary remark which best fitted that particular recipient—of that I will say nothing! There had to be first a rough copy of each letter, which was shown to father. Then came the improving of it, or perhaps the re-writing, and finally the copying of it on a proper sheet of paper without either mistake or blot. Dinner-time often came before I had thrown off even one of the six or seven that had to be composed! For years I used to salt with my tears the meals between Christmas and the New Year, and once I began to cry on Christmas Day itself, directly after the distribution of the presents, at the thought of the inevitable letters which would have to be written!

“My sister Louise was much quicker than I at getting each letter written differently, and at finding for each one a new transition from the list to the good wishes. Never has anyone so roused me to admiration of his or her epistolary cleverness as she did! This horror of studies, and letter-writing, which I acquired in childhood through having to write these letters of thanks lasted for years. Meanwhile circumstances have brought me into a position in which I have to maintain an unusually extensive correspondence, but I have not yet learnt how to compose letters in which one has at the end to make a neat transition to good wishes for the New Year. Therefore, whenever I have, as uncle or godfather, to make a Christmas present, I always forbid the recipients to write and thank me; they shall not, between Christmas and the New Year, salt their soup with their tears as I did! Even to-day I do not feel quite comfortable in my father’s study.”

(back to top)